Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described herein are not prior art to the claims in the present application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Some communication networks implement Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication, also known as Machine Type Communication (MTC), in which machines communicate directly with one another without any human intervention or with only limited human intervention. MTC devices can be used in a wide range of applications including security applications, transportation applications, health care applications, utilities applications, manufacturing applications and facility management applications. As a specific example, MTC devices may be installed in ammeters or other utility meters to autonomously report utility usage for, e.g., provisioning and billing of utilities.
Many MTC applications implement a relatively large number of MTC devices. For instance, a power company serving a geographical area may install MTC devices on many or all of the power meters at the residences, business, and/or other facilities within the geographical area. Given the wide range of MTC applications and large numbers of MTC devices that may be implemented for a given MTC application, MTC devices can add a significant signaling burden to the communication networks in which they are implemented.
For example, many communication networks include a location management mechanism in which an MTC device is periodically called to detect a location of the MTC device and determine whether to update stored location information for the MTC device. The MTC device is called even when the location of the MTC device has not changed, thereby adding unnecessary signaling overhead to the communication network.